Dogs Who Are Smarter Than Their Owners: Hot Car Edition

Last month, a Pennsylvania woman took Max, her 11-year-old chocolate lab, with her to run an errand. She says he’s like a member of the family. When she returned home that day, she forget her family member in the car. I have personally never met a labrador retriever who you could just forget was in the car with you, but Max’s owner went inside and started cleaning.

About an hour later, she heard a car horn. She went outside, looked around and didn’t see anyone. So, she went back to her chores. The honking started up again and this time she noticed Max sitting in the driver’s seat of her car.

She rescued her panting dog from the car, brought him inside and tried to cool him down with water and cold, wet rags. I wonder if Max told her to do that, too. The vet who ended up seeing him said, “Max saved his own life by honking the horn to get himself out of a very, very overheated car.”

I’ve called the annual summer phenomenon of dogs dying in cars The Most Avoidable Cause of Death in Dogs. It’s not some freak accident when a dog is left in a hot car; it’s no one else’s fault but the stupid human who put the dog in the car and left him there.

Just don’t do it. Not even for a “quick errand.” When it’s 80 degrees Fahrenheit outside, the temperature inside your car will hit 99 degrees in 10 minutes. After 20 minutes, it reaches 109 degrees. There is no bottle of milk, bank deposit or anything else you might “just run in for” that’s worth the life of your dog.

For a bonus dog-who’s-smarter-than-its-owner story, check out this woman who left her dog in the car while shopping at Costco. When she returned to the parking lot and found her dog dead, she went back in the store to try and get a refund for the pet supplies she’d just bought. (There’s not really any information on this particular dog’s personality or intelligence, but come on …)

The oven poster above is from United Animal Nations My Dog is Cool website, where you can download that and other tools to help educate the tools who lock their dogs in hot cars.